Born: 1913, Iraq (possibly)
Died: Unknown
Country most active: Turkey, United States
Also known as: NA
The following was written by Nina Baker and is excerpted from the book From Alchemy to Transport Phenomena: A Global History of Women in Chemical Engineering.
Faize Fatma Shevket (b. 1913) may have been Asia’s first woman to qualify as a chemical engineer, although her story is rather patchy. Her precise date and place of birth are unclear but as her father was Mahmud Shevke Pasha, the governor of Baghdad until his assassination in Istanbul 1913, it seems likely that she was born in Baghdad. Her father’s ethnicity is also unclear but Turkey claims her as one of their pioneering women engineers. What is known is that, having attended the American College for Girls in Istanbul, she won a Barbour Foundation scholarship to attend the University of Michigan 1933-36, graduating with an MSc in chemical engineering. Michigan claim her as their first female graduate in that discipline and in the same year she was admitted as a graduate member of the Michigan branch of ASCE. From 1937 to at least 1942 she was the Turkish government’s first female industrial inspector. Then the ‘trail goes cold’ again and nothing more is known. Obviously her family was extremely well-connected and presumably wealthy and her older sister Fazile was herself an academic zoologist first in the USA, later in Turkey, so the path towards an engineering career for Faize was as smooth as her times were able to make it.